Notes:NB The following description is ten years old, and untended since that
time:

I am one of the nameless many who has contributed little/no sourcecode, but
much in the way of advice and user support. I've been involved with
HTML::Mason and FreeBSD in such minor capacities recently.

The
tragedy of my life is that i disdain Perl, and yet rely on it for my livelihood.
*sigh*

AI is my primary non-work interest, specifically coaxing
computers into generating something vaguely recognizable as music. I've used
a number of languages towards this end, but mostly Scheme, and most recently
(and with much coolness) Python.

See, there's a good chance i'm about to lose my job.
Specifically, there's a good chance i'm about to lose my job
over something stupid, over my stubbornness and their
stubbornness and the lack of compromise.

I'd been working here for some five months when i realized
that i didn't remember filling out a List of Prior
Inventions. So i checked with HR to see if i had signed an
NDA or confidentiality agreement or whatever. Turns out i
hadn't, so they handed me one and told me to look it over,
sign it, and return it.

I actually read it. And it was absurdly broad, laying claim
to all intellectual property that i create during my time of
employment. So i pointed it out, pointed out why it was
wrong, and made some suggestions to remedy.

In return, they informed me that they weren't going to
change it.

Of course, it really isn't that big a deal, since, legally,
they wouldn't be able to successfully lay claim to something
which wouldn't also be covered by a more appropriately
narrow agreement. But legal atmospheres change, and many of
these sorts of disagreements don't make it to actual legal
action anyhow, and i'm beginning to feel leaned on by their
attempts to get me to sign, and it's all just a big, nasty
headache.

And, it goes without saying, the whole thing is a good deal
more complicated than i'm presenting it. It's just
frustrating to hear people tell me "Yeah, you're absolutely
in the right on this one, but sign it anyway because we're
not going to change it."

sphair:
I think you're talking about gumption, not inspiration.
Inspiration is great for realizing the solution to a
problem. Gumption is needed to actually implement that
solution.

On that note, if i may be so bold to dispense some advice, i
would recommend forgetting about it for a bit. When i find
that i'm slacking off at work and avoiding my computer at
home, i try to take a step back and relax. Then i find
something that's completely unrelated to what i
should be working on, and let myself get into it.
It's good for releasing tension, and lets you be productive
on something, which can help you go back to being
productive on whatever you were supposed to be doing in the
first place.

In fact, i end up doing alot of my fun stuff that way, as a
decompressor before hitting the stuff people are expecting
from me. Stream of
the Web came into existence that way. Give it a shot.

raph:
The boys at Berlin are
definitely dealing with the sort of resolution problems
you're worried about. All things drawn to the screen are
defined in terms of actual size, not virtual size (inches
vs. pixels).

For those of you who don't know, Berlin is endeavouring to
be a windowing system that can replace X. Whether or not you
think this is a good idea, you should check it out (and
possibly even offer to help).

aigeek: Probabilistic grammars are equivalent to Markov
chains when the grammar is the trivial case, which is where i am at the moment. ;-)

Seriously, though, my opinion is still that there are plenty of other people in the world writing music generators that
are based on Markov-ing and probabilistic grammars (which i generally consider the logical next step), who've been
doing it longer and better than i. What i'm working towards involves more on the structural level, more play with
themes and motifs, which i'm not convinced work well with those tools. And, besides, i'd much rather make it up
as
i go along (i came up with all of the ideas behind this project independently so far. only after i had been fiddling for
a while did someone point out the similarity between what i was doing and Markov chaining.).

It's certainly the case that doing something from scratch can lead you to reproducing other peoples' work, which is
generally considered inefficient, redundant, and bad. On the other hand, knowing a given solution to a problem can
often limit your thinking about that problem to ways in which the solution is applicable (give a person a hammer,
and everything starts looking like a nail. give someone hash tables native in a language, and they'll use them
everywhere -- even when a tree or queue might be more appropriate.). I wanted to go into this project with as few
preconceptions as possible. If i reproduced work, so be it. If not, then maybe i'd have stumbled on a novel, useful
technique.

Of course, if this were a systems project or something similarly complicated and mission-critical, i'd definitely be
grabbing as much outside info as possible. But it's an AI project, so i can do as i please...

That said, probabilistic grammars are something that interest me (in their natural language applications, as
opposed to musical). Can you recommend any books on the topic?